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At the start of this month Amazon released a new feature to their reserved instances called Instance Size Flexibility. You can read more about it here. This is quite a handy little update to how they handle reserved instances on a regional setting.

When they first came out, reserved instances were great for the huge savings but a real pita to manage in large environments spanning multiple regions or accounts. In order to take advantage of it you had to make sure you reserved the proper region and instance type for ALL of your individual instances. With few servers of only 1 or 2 types, not a big deal but scale out to hundreds of servers in multiple regions, zones and accounts and you had a recipe for a major accounting and administrative nightmare unless you looked into automation. That all changed in the last quarter of 2016 when Amazon released updates to how RI’s worked.Read the rest of this entry »

Running out of hard drive space is a bane of every system administrator. Shutting down the server to add another drive then relaunching, or maybe you are lucky enough to have hot swappable hard drives making the process less painful. Well in the cloud on Amazon AWS you no longer need to shutdown or reimage your instance to expand your hard drives. If you are already using EBS backed instances, you now have the ability to modify your volumes on the fly.

This is how you resize your EBS drives on the fly on a EC2 instance. If you are using instance storage you cannot do this obviously, it only works on EBS backed instances.Read the rest of this entry »

I previously wrote an article in 2009 about how much you might expect to pay for hosting your server/services using Amazon AWS EC2 and S3. The conclusion was that it would cost you approximately $920/year up to over $10K/year depending on the instance type you chose to run to host your server on Amazon.

Over the course of time the cost of hosting on Amazon Web Services has come down dramatically and their service offerings have increased 5 fold from what they had. Let’s take a look at what you will pay now versus 2009 for the comparable setups. For the sake of simplicity I am going to use current 4th generation on demand pricing but there are a few cases where it might be cheaper to use 3rd generation over 4th. There are very few good reasons to still be using first generation servers though. It should also be pointed out that Amazon also launched spot instances which are an even cheaper way to run an ec2 instance albeit not necessarily as reliable.Read the rest of this entry »

So Amazon does not allow accept/deny rules on their firewall system which is beyond silly in this day and age, but I digress. If you want to limit access to an apache server behind Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, your options are fairly sparse (although there are options).

One such way to accomplish this is to first allow logging of the IP from the ELB using the X-Forwarded-For header. You can see how to do this here.

So once you have setup logging of the IP’s in the apache logs, you now want to adjust the site configuration files. We have individual files in /etc/apache2/sites-available, so we add the following to the specific site. You may do something similar or you may have it all in a httpd.conf, or you can even put this into a .htaccess file.Read the rest of this entry »

We recently had an issue where we had to track the IP’s of the remote hosts connecting to the servers behind our Amazon elastic load balancer. In order to accomplish this we had to adjust the LOGFORMAT of the apache server to log that X-FORWARDED-FOR header that is sent by the ELB. This can vary depending on the server, but you will either need to edit your httpd.conf or apache2.conf file (often in /etc/apache2/).